Disable autosave

I'm on your side here, Yvan. Your English isn't the best, but it's a 1000% better than any attempt I could make at French. 🙂 At least you try, rather than posting in French.

Yvan's English is perfectly fine. Let's not get off track here.

As Bob Peters said upthread, when something goes wrong, file a bug report at http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/. I *have* gotten responses back from this -- requests for more information, suggestions on what to try. Especially for those people having Keynote or iWorks problems today, file those bugs! Autosave/Versions does not impact my workflow today, so I have no standing to complain, as it were, but everyone who is affected should report it.

When I worked as a potter, my English was sufficient to say "US go home" to some annoying visitors able to speak French with one of their friends but refusing to speak French to my wife in the shop 😉

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 24 octobre 2011 19:01:37

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

- or in comprehensible English:

Tom, How's your French?

To be honest, when an asker is French, I write my answer in French.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 24 octobre 2011 19:07:07

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

Yvan's English is perfectly fine.

I could have sworn that's essentially what I said. Some of his phrases are a bit odd to native English users, and a few words are consistently misspelled; but overall, Yvan's English is very good. And compared to the tragically bad English we routinely see here by people for whom English is their native language, Yvan's English is superb.

Kurt, my apologies -- I was trying to back you up!

Heh! Sorry, I read it the opposite way. But enough of that. Time to get back on track. 🙂

I know that I'm pig headed but I must say thank you to those reacting to Tom's message.

On the left edge of my physical desktop is a sheet of paper with a list of words which some users gave me the right spelling.

Do you know why the system's spell checker doesn't apply in these forums ?

From what I see, it would not be useful only for me.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 24 octobre 2011 19:19:25

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

No, the spell check doesn't work in these forums with Safari 5.1.x, while it does with other browsers, or Safari 5.0.5 and earlier. I can go anywhere else on the web and automatic on-the-fly spell check in Safari 5.1.x works. Just not here, for whatever bizarre reason.

If you're using Safari 5.1.x here, you have to press Command+Shift+; to call up the spelling and grammar checker. Then it will finally flag misspelled words.

One word that catches my eye is that you spell bought as baught. While the spell check does flag baught, with an "a" is a very Old English way of spelling it.

I too want to disable autosave. It is a dangerous feature and will result in alot of data loss and other unintended consequences for users. Here is the feedback I sent to apple. Others should similarly voice their concerns. Hopefully they will listen.

snip! -----

This feature is a data loss nightmare waiting to happen.

Consider Case 1:

create a file in Text edit.

type "foo"

Save as foo.rtf on the internal HD

quit text edit

double click on foo.rtf

type bar

note "edited" in the title bar

quit but don't save

So now the file is in an "edited" state but not saved.

If I double click on the file I can revert and all is good.

Now move foo.rtf to an external HD. Do this by copying and then deleting the one in the internal HD.

Double click on foo.rtf on the external HD (MacOS Extended volume)

File is no longer in "edited" state. I cannot revert to the version that I actually saved. I have lost my original file. Note also that there is no way to know, without opening the file in text edit that the file is in an edited state so I cannot know that I am losing information.

This is bad.

Very very bad.

In addition to moving the file consider what happens if I were to e-mail that original "edited" file from the internal HD. Mail.app has no idea it's an "edited" file. And so I will be e-mailing the edited version rather than the last saved version which would be my expectation. Again.. there's no way in any app but Text Edit to know that this file is in an "edited" state thus leading to a plethora of unintended consequences.

Rather than saving the "edited" version in the original location and keeping the last saved version in the on-disk DB it should be the other way around. The file I explicitly save to disk should be sacred. Nothing should change it but me. When I load the file in text edit it can load the "edited" version from the DB so that the behaviour there is the same but I can still keep my files on disk safe.

Please fix this. This is dangerous. Many people are going to lose a lot of data because the behaviour is opaque and inscrutable.

berj wrote:

Please fix this. This is dangerous. Many people are going to lose a lot of data because the behaviour is opaque and inscrutable.

Wow - nightmare ! Absolutely not acceptable. The key statement is "The file I explicitly save to disk should be sacred. Nothing should change it but me". Quite so.

What is happening at Apple?

quit but don't save

....

So now the file is in an "edited" state but not saved.

So what is different from any other file editing system. If you don't save the edit before you close the file?

In fact, if I make a messy edit, I want that it does not save automatically when I quit. This happens to me quite often...

putnik wrote:

So what is different from any other file editing system. If you don't save the edit before you close the file?

Did you actually try how it works and are trying to say there is no difference?

Or, didn't try and are asking is there any difference? If so, then yes, there is a huge difference - before you could just close without saving, now you cannot.

putnik wrote:

In fact, if I make a messy edit, I want that it does not save automatically when I quit. This happens to me quite often...

In that case, versions is not the thing you want. Especially if you made wrong edits to 500+ pages document. How you are going to find which version is the one you want to keep?

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

I was perfectly serious and continue to be.

...

In that case, could you please answer few questions:

1.) Preview is a viewer (or, that is what I think, judging the name). Opening a file and rotating it (just to view it more conveniently) will modify it. In SL, you could simply click "no" to the save request. Now, there is no save prompt and file is modified automatically. Are people who designed it ok? Is there any meaning in this behaviour? If yes, what exactly? Even first versions of Acrobat had different commands for rotation for viewing and rotation as editing.

2.) Files are different. Autocad drawings printed in pdf contain huge number of elements. If you want to edit a pdf with set of such files, Preview will freeze for at least few minutes at every attempt to save a version (especially if file is on the server). At close, Preview will "notify" that it file is on the volume that could not permanently store versions. So, all this "saving of versions" was just to annoy me and punish for choosing Mac, right?

3.) I somehow had HP printer which was displaying a red warning LED every time it was warming up. I was really annoyed to jump up just to discover that printer is not out of paper but just warming up. I was sure this printer is made by idiots, because it was requesting my attention when there was actually no need for that.

Now, when Preview decides to save a version (which will take some 3-4 minutes, see above) and I am doing something else, it shows jumping Dock icon, as if there is some emergency. Same thing? Are people who made it like that OK?

4.) There is a protection against accidental modification of files. If I did not modify the file for pre-set period of time, it will lock it. Nice, very clever.

But, if there are files created by other users on the server, same rule applies!! If the owner of file modified it an hour ago, I can now accidentally modify it without any restriction!

I think this is an utter nonense, what do you think about it?

Thanks.